A Balance to Contagious Enthusiasm

Four Quotes

Justifying the rite can easily obscure the mentality of some of those who use the rite to create a homogenized ghetto of non-ethnics, in resistance to the supposed monolithicworld of ethnics out there. In reality, often enough, its just a ghetto of middle-class American values, and the other issues are symbolic.

This is not a reprint but an abbreviated excerpt of four quotations (addressed to WR Orthodox) from an article here (1/8/2007):
[we tried to link to it, but his links don’t work]

1. The reality is that most Western Orthodox Christians (that is, Orthodox Christians living in the West and possessing a Western culture) are Byzantine Rite and see no contradiction between their rite and their culture. Most of them have never heard of you.

2. When you use sarcastic phrases like the oh-so-mystical East, you give yourself away as being as much of an East-hater as you believe your brothers in the Byzantine parts of the Orthodox Church are West-haters. Many of you used to be Episcopalians besieged by utter heretics. It’s okay, though—you’re now among the Orthodox. You’re no longer besieged. You can take the battlements down and lower your weapons. Yes, there are folks in the Orthodox Church who do not understand you or even suspect the validity of your Orthodoxy. You won’t help them to accept you fully by sarcasm or a fortress mentality, however.

3. You were received into this Church and not into the pre-Schism Western Church. That means that you can’t pretend that people like St. Gregory Palamas aren’t relevant to you. For one thing, there is no East-West dividing line for what is needful in the Church, and for another, those to whom you rightly look for inspiration in the ancient West absolutely had zero problem with adopting the “Eastern” language and theology of their time (where, quite frankly, most of the serious doctrinal work was being done, due to heresy). They even adopted liturgical customs! It’s not a question of what’s appropriate to “the East” or “the West,” but what is Orthodox. Anything else is really a form of phyletism.

4. You do not have more in common with either the Roman Catholic or Anglican communions than you do with the Byzantine Rite Orthodox. Thinking or speaking as though you do is really just a schism waiting to happen.

"Not to enable the poor to share in our goods is to steal from them and deprive them of life. The goods we possess are not ours but theirs." -- St. John Chrysostom

From OrthodoxWest

"I admit I have not scrutinized this blog, however based upon a quick peruse of the site I find it to be at most times a healthy criticism of the milieu of Orthodox Western Rite. ... The author calls for balance in the face of American WR enthusiasms." - Fr Stavrophoremonk Symeon, OrthodoxWest moderator

The York Forum

"I just discovered the existence of this new Orthodox blog on the Western Rite. To me, it appears to be a serious, fair-minded, and substantive blog, though perhaps more critical of the concept of Western Rite than I should like. . . . critics of the Western rite abound. Few care enough, though, to really think out what it is they mean, beyond having a knee-jerk reaction." - Hieromonk Aidan

Fr. Augustine

“I was directed to this site, recently, and I have to say I thank God for it.
I am a believer that the Western Rite is viable and possible; I also believe that we are going about it rather poorly! I have long wanted people within the Western Rite to question themselves, their presuppositions, and to look critically at what they are doing….”

Posting Comments

Comments are most welcome. The whole point is to defend the discussion of real concerns which seem to have been squelched in general. We believe this is healthy. One caveat: even if feelings may run high, please try to be rational and courteous.

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Fr. Alexander Schmemann

The question of rites is precisely not, has never been and cannot be a mere question of rites per se , but is and has always been a question of faith, of its wholeness and integrity.

Criticism

A serious examination and judgment of something. From the Greek κριτικός, kritikós - one who discerns, which itself arises from the Ancient Greek word κριτής, krités, meaning a person who offers reasoned judgement or analysis.

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The York Forum

"My gut feeling about the site's owner turned out to be correct. He is not at all a rabid anti-Western riter but, like St. Thomas, wants to "put his hand into the side" of the Western rite so as to revere what is reverend about it. So far it has been a discussion zone less heated than other WR discussion fora. It shows some promise." - Rev. Hieromonk Aidan